Engineering the Artefact not the Process

I am dissatisfied with the IT industry. From the outside people think it’s all moving so fast and is full of relentless innovation towards the future. From the inside it feels at least in part like a stagnating pool with innovation increasingly confined to narrow niches. Is this because we are focusing too much of our collective energy on the process rather than the artifacts we are creating? The first real practical computers were realised in the 1940’s though the theoretical foundations were established a decade earlier.
Published May 3, 2013  7 min read   it industry · philosophy
 

NetKernel IDE Feedback

Thank you to all those who provided feedback on what you’d like to see in a NetKernel IDE Plugin. This is a topic that has been on my mind for a couple of years now as various folks have dabbled with creating one, and as we have observed many development teams and how they use their IDEs to truly integrate all their tools. So the feedback I received was pretty much in consensus in some areas and widely varied in others.
Published Apr 12, 2013  3 min read   netkernel
 

Sand Ripple Patterns

This, perhaps surprisingly, is a subject that I now know far too much about. As part of a side project to recreate an old rendering of a beach scene I wanted a heightmap of some typical sand ripples - you know the ones you always see on every beach and desert. They look mostly like period waves but have interesting joins and branches kind of like magnetic domains. Anyway, even the power of Google couldn’t find anything at all.
Published Mar 4, 2013  2 min read   fun · simulation · photography
 

Heap Tuning for Large NetKernel Instances Part 2

In the last post I set the stage for a discussion on how to tune large NetKernel instances by providing a discussion of how the Java heap operates and how the NetKernel representation cache interacts with that. Now we are ready to get into the details of how to tune your system. So let’s get stuck in. First we need to capture a of couple metrics: Fixed OldGen - this is composed of the long lived objects that are the modules, spaces, endpoints and kernel data structures.
Published Feb 7, 2013  9 min read   netkernel · caching · optimisation
 

Heap Tuning for Large NetKernel Instances Part 1

I’m writing this post to document information that I learned whilst developing the new NetKernel enterprise L1 representation cache (released today!). Knowledge of how to tune large Java instances is readily available but because NetKernel uses a cache as an integral part of it’s operation and usually this takes up a significant majority of the heap space of a running system this effects the conventional wisdom. So this article summarizes and augments this information with tips and details for tuning large NetKernel instances.
Published Jan 25, 2013  6 min read   netkernel · caching · optimisation
 

What Is NetKernel?

This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill, the story ends, you will wake up at your desk and believe what you want to believe. You take the red pill, you will stay in Wonderland, and we show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Homage to one of the best movies ever. The situation is the same. Are you ready to know what NetKernel is?
Published Dec 24, 2012  1 min read   fun
 

NetKernel Protocol Scaling Demonstration

A demo showing how the NetKernel NKP Protocol can scale. It shows a server running in the cloud with a large number of concurrent clients connecting.
Published Dec 22, 2012  1 min read   netkernel protocol · netkernel · optimisation
 

Cut to the Chase

“Cut to the chase” is something you’re only likely to hear me say if I’m enduring some kind of Dickensian wordfest drawn out from the changing of a single bit of information. However in this case I’m not the actor but rather it’s a new architectural endpoint for NetKernel that can keep your web apps on track and up-to-date. Let me explain. Whilst working on the recent representation cache update I noticed that the standard pattern of issuing AJAX requests from the browser was causing a problem.
Published Dec 20, 2012  3 min read   netkernel · architecture · optimisation
 

New Enterprise Representation Cache

Last week we had a get together with representatives of some of our key partners in Brussels. There, amongst other things, I demonstrated a key new technology that I’ve been working on for the last couple of months. This is an all new enterprise grade representation cache. The NetKernel representation cache is a mechanism for storing the responses from endpoints with the aim of eliminating duplicate computation. This is made possible because every computation is uniquely identified with a combination of resource identifier and request scope.
Published Dec 13, 2012  6 min read   netkernel · caching
 

Dynamic Grammars

Last week I received a request for advice on an interesting problem from Grégoire Colbert. He’s given me permission to share his request and I hope to share with you the solution. Let’s imagine that I have a constantly evolving OWL file of living species. I want NetKernel to read this OWL resource, and allow the user to get a representation for each entry in the OWL file : > /birds/sparrow > /fishes/tuna The difficulty is that when NetKernel starts, I (as a programmer) don’t have any idea of what the OWL file will contain, and so I cannot write a static grammar with /birds/sparrow and /fishes/tuna.
Published Sep 28, 2012  5 min read   netkernel
 

Mindmap Of NetKernel Universe

As part of our ongoing efforts to at least provide crampons if not materially reduce the learning curve required to reach the epiphany of Mt NetKernel I want to present our latest efforts with a visual representation of the structure of knowledge within the NetKernel documentation. It is a mindmap; a visual map of the structure of the documentation contained in the core books. It is dynamically generated and clicking on the nodes takes you straight to the actual page within the documentation.
Published Aug 24, 2012  2 min read   netkernel
 

REST and ROC

Brad Jones has his fingers on so many pulses that I imagine him beavering away in his leguminous clinic. So when he said to me last week that my last post would really help people familiar with REST to see what ROC was about it made me think. I realised that the aim was valid but that it wasn’t really well addressed despite Brad’s enthusiasm. So of course I better do something about that!
Published Jul 3, 2012  5 min read   resource oriented computing · rest